Robert Douglas-Fairhurst delights in a collection of short works by
Julian Barnes, Through the Window.

In the opening chapter of Julian Barnes’s 1984 novel Flaubert’s Parrot, his narrator recalls how Félicité, the servant in Flaubert’s story Un coeur simple, hoards relics and knick-knacks with equal relish. Part-chapel and part-bazaar, her room is home to an “assembly of stray objects, united only by their owner’s affection”. It’s tempting to view Barnes’s latest work in the same light.

These 17 essays (and a short story) reveal just as much about the author’s preferences as they do about their subjects. Three essays deal with Ford Madox Ford, and two with Kipling, while Barnes’s love of rummaging around in the dimmer reaches of French culture is also proudly on display, including a bravura celebration of the architectural guardian Prosper Mérimée, and a more ambivalent piece on the contemporary novelist Michel Houellebecq, who allegedly once responded to the prospect of being profiled in The Observer by getting “catatonically drunk” and telling his interviewer that “he’d only answer further questions if she slept with him”.

The fact all of these essays have been published before might lead a cynical reader to view the collection less as a bazaar than a literary jumble-sale: a pile of second-hand items assembled in the shadow of Barnes’s 2011 Man Booker Prize-winning The Sense of an Ending. His publishers certainly don’t seem worried about the connection – the cover of this book mentions the prize three times – even if the decision to follow up a short novel with a collection of even shorter forms suggests a certain anxiety about the attention span of most readers.

In fact the parallels between Barnes’s essays and his fiction run much deeper. The Sense of an Ending asks to be read twice, once to listen to what the narrator has to say, and a second time to hear what he is busily avoiding or repressing, and many of these essays work in a similar way. They ask us to think again about what we assumed we already knew, and then make us realise that our earlier understanding was as full of holes as a piece of Swiss cheese.

Take Barnes’s brilliant exegesis of the opening sentence of Ford’s The Good Soldier: “This is the saddest story I have ever heard”, where he points out that “It cannot logically be until the second reading (and it may not be until the third or fourth) that we note the falsity of the final word. Because it’s not a story Dowell, the narrator, has ‘heard’. It’s one in which he has participated.” Or his assessment of Penelope Fitzgerald’s life as one that “seemed designed to wrong-foot, to turn attention away from the fact that she was, or would turn into, a great novelist”. Repeatedly, Barnes reveals his ability to make the familiar look unfamiliar, holding pieces of writing up to the light and slowly turning them until they start to glint.

If most of this is down to his sharp eyes and ears, some of it can also be accounted for by his style, which tends to look at life with a wry smile that can easily turn into a snarl if faced with pomposity or dullness. It is the sort of style that does not announce its cleverness – which may be one of the cleverest things about it – but still manages to come up with phrases that stick in the reader’s head, as when he refers to “the flapping laundry of our emotional lives”, or describes Mérimée as a “truffler of the sexual lowlife”.

He has favourite subjects: misunderstanding, self-deception, the unexpected ironies of history. He also has pet phrases: in one essay we are told how, at the end of the 19th century, some French soldiers set out on a two-year expedition “Frenchly… equipped with 1,300 litres of claret, 50 bottles of Pernod and a mechanical piano”; in another we learn that the critic and journalist Félix Fénéon “Frenchly” managed to combine working at the War Office “with being a committed anarchist”.

But this collection is also full of unexpected pleasures. They include a generous tribute to John Updike that points out “his passionate attentiveness” to the world, an elegant short story (“Homage to Hemingway”) that shuffles around narrative perspectives like a set of cards, and an essay on bereavement that, published less than three years after the death of Barnes’s wife, is all the more moving for not once referring to her by name. Even the index is brimming with jokes, with entries that include “Bradbury, Malcolm: possibly made of plastic” and “Eric: few saints called Eric”. Such local surprises are typical of the book as a whole, which encourages readers to dip and rewards them for lingering.